


Mrs. Lane

by MsMay



Series: My DCU [5]
Category: DCU
Genre: Copious amounts of tea, Family, Implied Relationships, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 05:30:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10074341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsMay/pseuds/MsMay
Summary: Lois Lane has known Damian for three or four years now, and talking to him hasn't gotten any easier. Still, she doesn't think she'd trade it for the world.Or, Damian feels like Jon is ignoring him, and asks Mrs. Lane for advice in the most convoluted and round-about way possible.





	

“Damian.” Lois Lane says. Well, legally, she’s Lois Lane-Kent, but to anyone who’s ever known her she’ll always be Lois Lane. Lois Lane is the name etched onto her Pulitzer prize. It’s the name that dominated half of _The Daily Planet’s_ front pages. It’s the name all of her rivals and enemies curse when she one-ups them, again.

Although secretly, if you ask her, she’ll tell you she’s not too terribly bothered when the mothers at Jon’s school call her Mrs. Kent instead of Lois Lane. Lois Lane and Mrs. Kent aren’t two different people like, Clark and Superman, just facets of the same, loving, driven woman.

This is all a very long and distracted way of saying that when Lois Lane comes home from work, and Damian Wayne, in full Robin gear, is perched on her kitchen counter like it’s a parapet in Gotham, she is equal parts curious and endeared.

“Mrs. Lane,” he says. He’s the only one who says it like that. Lois Lane has always wondered why, but she worries that drawing attention to this fact will fluster him. For the stoic heir to The Night, he’s a very sensitive boy. 

“Would you like some cookies?” she asks. There’s a minuscule heightening of tension in his body, as his eyes go to the (empty) cookie jar. _Ha!_ she thinks with some satisfaction. Looks like even the boy wonder couldn’t find her secret hiding place.

“I do not eat such childish things,” he says. It’s honestly the only way to save his pride. If he admits that he wants one, he has to admit that he can’t find them.

“Suit yourself,” she says. Damian continues to perch on the counter. Lois can wait. She waited for Clark to come around and finally tell her he was Superman, a boy in a bat costume is no match for her patience. Damian watches. Then he hops off the counter and trudges out to the dining room table. Lois opens the fridge and then ducks behind one of the counters. Hidden behind the Drain-o is a zip lock bag of chocolate chip cookies. Then she gets up, makes some noise in the fridge, closes the fridge, and puts water on for tea.

When she heads into the dining room, Damian is munching on a cookie himself. There’s a sly smile on his face. _You rat,_ she thinks with unabashed fondness. _And here I thought I’d fooled you._

“Cream, and two sugars,” she says, as she sets his tea in front of him. Damian nods his approval. Lois has noticed that he won’t admit to liking tea, let alone liking it with cream and sugar, in front of anyone else in the family, even Kara. She thinks of this as a point of pride.

“My thanks,” he says, after he sips it. That’s good, it means she made it as close to ‘correct’ as she’ll probably ever get. Whatever other things Talia Al Ghoul instilled in her son, she gave him a very particular pallet.

“To what do I owe this visit?” she asks, sipping her own tea. Hers is mostly just warmed honey.

“Your son is failing his duties as a superhero. He is disgracing the name of Superman,” Damian says. He’s pouting. An accusation like that probably means that Jon hasn’t been paying him enough attention. When Kon forgot Tim’s birthday, Damian insisted that ‘the clone’ had ‘dishonored his family, and betrayed their sacred trust.’ There was also something in there about how he’d be banned from Gotham for the foreseeable future, which was, apparently, until Tim forgave him a week later.

For a kid who claims to be a cold blooded assassin, he is so anxious about everyone in his life getting along exactly how he wants them too. She thinks it’s due to the fact that he’s lost half his family at some point or another. It takes ages to make him trust someone (Lois has known the boy since he was ten, and he still puts on airs around her), but once he does he clings to them tightly. Lois knows this will be a problem for him when he starts to make his own family, but right now she can’t help but find it endearing. The kid has had a rough start. The least the world owes him is some family stability. Although maybe she should stop calling him a kid, he’s sixteen or seventeen now.

“Has he now?” Lois asks. Damian nods, and takes a petulant sip of his tea. Lois wants to laugh; it’s no wonder Selina always calls him the baby.

“ _Yes,”_ Damian insist. “His replies to my messages have been _tardy_ at best, and unnecessarily brusque.”

Lois hums into her cup. She knows where this is going. 

“That doesn’t sound like Jon. Are you sure he’s really ignoring you?” she asks. Damian colors beneath his mask, the honey color of his skin blushing rosy gold. Or at least that’s how Jon always describes it in the sappy ‘vague’ poetry he writes in the journal he thinks she doesn’t read. Is it an invasion of privacy? Yes. But Lois is an investigative journalist. She thinks of it like investigating a particularly tricky subject.   

“Here, look for yourself,” Damian says, leaning over the table and putting the phone in front of her face. There are . . . A lot more messages than Lois would have guessed. Jon’s phone is, admittedly, crappy. He hasn’t upgraded in more than four years. That’s partly because Smallville has terrible service no matter what phone you choose, and partly because he has his communicator. If his friends need to contact him, they can call him. But looking at Damian’s messages, they text almost constantly. Jon must be more careful about it when he’s at home, considering Lois hasn’t seen him text much.

“Well?” Damian demands.

“I’m not finished looking,” she says. She pries the phone out of his hand, and then flicks up through the messages. Some are one word responses. There are a few that have hours in between when Damian sent the message and when Jon responded. This pattern has become worse as of late. She scrolls up a little farther, back to about two weeks, where Jon’s messages stretch out into huge paragraphs with perfect punctuation.

Oh how adorable, her son doesn’t know how to text. He takes after his father.

Out of curiosity, Lois exits the text app, and checks out his phone background.

“Hey, what are you doing!” Damian shrieks. He reaches across the table to snatch the phone from her, but it’s too late. She saw. There’s a beautiful photograph of Jon, sitting on top of one of Gotham’s gargoyles. He’s dressed in his Superboy costume, and the wind is making his cape billow. One of his feet hangs over the side of its head, dangling near the gargoyle’s teeth. The other foot is propped up. He leans back on his hands, and looks out into the setting sun with bright eyes. Bellow, Lois can just barely see Gotham’s twinkling lights. Jon smiles in profile.  

“Can I have that photo?” she asks. Clark would like it. It reminds her, almost, of the first one Jimmy took of Superman.

“No!” Damian insists, clutching the phone to his chest. Then he blinks and scowls. “Tell him, and you die.”

“Duly noted,” Lois replies, sipping her tea. Damian looks back at his phone, then Lois, then his phone.

At long last he finally asks, “I suppose you have sufficient information now. What could possibly justify your son’s transgressions? Honestly, I am curious as to how on earth he could explain such ineptitude.”

Lois takes another long sip of her tea. She’s almost out. Maybe she’ll get up and go make some more, just to watch Damian squirm. He’s taking this whole insulting-to-cover-vulnerability thing a little too far. However, as she watches him, she notes the way his mouth worries, as if he were biting the inside of his cheek. He is shifting ever so slightly in his seat. He can’t quite meet her eyes. _Guilty,_ she decides. _He feels guilty_. It’s clear that thinks he did something to upset Jon.

Lois reviews the text conversations in her head. When Jon started responding two hours late with one word replies, Damian got a little snippy, but Jon was already responding with fewer and fewer words before that.

_Ah!_

There weren’t any pictures. It had been about a week since Jon sent him a picture of the farm or the town. Damian had even sent him a picture of Gotham, with the caption ‘my city is prettier than your city’ to bait him, and Jon hadn’t responded at all. That was, what, two days ago? So that was what tipped Damian over the edge.  

“Homecoming,” Lois says.

“I’m sorry, what?” Damian lets the cookie in his hand thump against the table. It scatters crumbs everywhere. Lois gives it a firm look, and Damian quickly sweeps up the crumbs into his hand before getting up to throw them in the nearby bin.

“Homecoming. Hoco. It’s a big deal here in Smallville. Clark let Jon join the football team this year. He has stick to bench warming, but the football team still gets pretty involved. Besides, he’s on student council. They organize all of the nonsense, and things have only gotten crazier since I went to high school,” Lois says. Damian sits back down, looks her dead in the eye from behind his mask and then shakes his head.

“I do not follow. What is ‘homecoming?’” He leans forward, as if they are trading secrets.

“It’s a football game,” she says. Damian clicks his teeth, and Lois smirks. He’s so easy to ruffle when she’s purposefully obtuse.

“Well even I know _that_ , Gotham Academy does have sports and the like. Though not football, that’s a waste of everyone’s time,” he says, casting a glare at his phone, as if Jon might hear him and suddenly give up on the sport. “There’s no way that could preoccupy him for more than a few days before hand.”

“Well, he may be Superboy, but it’s a big event,” Lois says. She watches as Damian’s East Coast skepticism settles in.

“They have to make sure everyone’s pom-poms are fluffed and ready. That’s _hardly_ a task considering Jon’s caliber.”

“I wasn’t aware you thought so highly of him,” she says. Damian flushes and his mouth drops open before he shakes his head.

“I am merely suggesting that he has capabilities above the average human. It is least one would expect from him, seeing as how he is a Kryptonian.”

“Hm, that’s certainly true. But there’s still so much to do, between traditions, and the planning, and his date-”

“His what?” Damian looks as if he’d just been knocked through a wall.

“His date,” Lois says. “It’s taboo to go to homecoming without a date. And apparently you can’t just ask someone casually, it has to be a big proposal.”

“So has he . . .”

Lois pauses, checking her nails. Every second that passes makes Damian more agitated, until the boy wonder is actually bouncing his leg. Lois relents, settling her hand back on the table.

“Not that I know of,” she says.  

Silence falls between them, as Damian stares into the kitchen. In all likelihood he is just looking at it. There is no greater intent in his gaze. Lois has noticed that Damian has a habit of doing that. His eyes catch over the novelty of her home’s mundane things.

“I do not believe this ‘homecoming’ is enough to distract him,” he says after a while. “It seems a trivial event. This warrants more research.” He frowns, staring down at the phone as if he expects it to ring at any second. The longer he looks at it; the sadder Lois feels. Since she is so endeared to this strange child, she decides to throw him a bone.   

“Jon should be home in about an hour, you can ask him then.” She checks her watch. “Speaking of which, don’t you have school?”

“As if there were things those fools could teach me that I did not already know,” he says, puffing up like the little birdy he is. Lois Lane should disagree with that statement, but he’s not entirely wrong. School has a lot to teach him, but what Damian Wayne needs to learn might be better taught in Jon’s school.

“There’s plenty out there you’ve yet to discover,” she says. Damian Wayne scoffs. Lois Lane goes to take a sip of her tea, but it looks like she’s all out. Jon still won’t be home for another forty-five minutes. “You should visit more often, you know.”

Damian pauses. For a moment it looks as if he’ll have something smart to say, but then he sighs, and peels of his mask. That has such a strange effect. He looks older without his Robin mask, and a little more real. He presses a careful finger over the rim of the mask.

Lois gets up from the table and starts to clean. She picks up his teacup and is surprised to see that it’s empty. Usually, if he finishes his tea he slips out of the house, regardless of whether or not Jon has come home yet. It’s Damian’s way of saving his pride, or something of that sort. If he leaves before Jon comes, he can say that he wasn’t there waiting for him.

She rinses the cups in the sink. They smell like lemon dish soap now. Damian shuffles up from the table to dry off the tea cups as she sets them to the side. The lotion by the sink, is cotton scented, so Lois feels very clean when she is all finished. Damian tries some too. He gets flustered when more lotion comes out than he knows what to do with. Lois pretends she doesn’t see him struggle to covertly wipe the excess off with a dish towel.

“When is Jon going to get here?” Damian asks when there are no longer dishes to preoccupy him. Lois smiles softly.

“In a half hour or so,” she replies, dusting off her work pants. Damian fingers his mask. He brought it with him when he got up from the table, and set it on a clean spot on the kitchen counter.

“It’s hot. Do you think he would mind if I borrowed a change of clothes?” He picks at the hem of his Kevlar tunic.

“Not at all,” she says, shuffling him back to Jon’s room even though she knows he knows the way. But that is one of those things his professors can’t teach him. For perhaps the first time in his life, Damian is wishing he could be more ‘normal.’ Lois can see the anemoia in his eyes as plain as day. The inhibitions he inherited from his father and mother are peeling back, revealing something smaller and simple. Before she met this boy, with his heart of glass shards, she had not thought that a Super could make anyone feel less complicated. But here Damian Wayne stands rethinking his every ambition, so that he can match at least one to the lazy slant of light through Jon’s bedroom window. 

As Damian passes through Jon’s doorway, free of his preternatural assassin’s grace, Lois Lane-Kent thinks that maybe she likes watching these boys grow up, more than she likes her Pulitzer. 


End file.
